Archive for December, 2009

The obsession with everything related to this blog has come to an end. Looking back at me through the camera is a blind spot; not a stain that can be wiped off with a damp cloth. Twitter is like Goa: everyone is there right now. Facebook gives me updates on events, and suggestions to become a fan of things no one cares about.

Of all the things that shouldn’t matter, networking is something that can now be easily done without. Forget spamming people with blog links, there is no motivation to go online to even check mail. To those who know me, it’ll come as a surprise that I talk way too much now. It’s like someone gave me nitrazepam, I just can’t stop talking.

The new (old) business strategy soon to get back on track my lifestyle, the devil bless those who have been loading me with alcohol and drugs since the beginning of December.

You will not believe how much a person’s views and tolerance level can change instantly; I will throw something at anyone who wants to talk about ‘spirituality’. I will speak for 10 whole minutes on how sick I am of everything spiritual (except tantric sex), and then I will pick up and throw a potentially harmful object. Not sure if it means I’ve turned into a materialist, but a fine black hat and a new pair of shades made me very happy, fuck yeah. Another jhol or five and I’ll throw a party and go on a shopping spree. Whee.

I have a week to think about the year gone by, and a few weeks before I get busy with work. Every morning my reflection has this twinkle in its eyes as it says to me in the friendliest tone I’ve ever heard, “It’s okay.” That’s supposed to mean either that letting go of the past is okay, or that things are already fine and shit in general shouldn’t be a cause of bother. The most reassuring thing to hear as I strike ‘internet connection’ off the hibernation to-do list. See you in 2010.

Guess who this superhot babe is and win a bottle of Antiquity Rare Whisky in February 2010.

Like this:

The next time you want to have a picnic, head straight to Kharghar/CBD Belapur. Raintree Marg offers you a quiet place where not too many specimens of the pathetic human race can be found, and as a bonus you get the best view of Navi Mumbai. Kharghar Hills is one of the best places I’ve been introduced to in recent times, and it is where I’ll escape to when I can’t take any more of everyday life and have only a day to be away.

Can’t go a-trekkin’ on Kharghar Hills, it’s a picnic spot. Don’t be a fool like me; I was all set for a trekking adventure but ended up walking all the bloody way up. Next time, I’ll take a vehicle which ensures I reach the top in 15 minutes instead of walking for an hour in the scorching sun. An advantage of walking all the way up is it teaches a good lesson – it’s great to get excited like a school kid but it’s equally necessary to do your homework.

Walking up, we saw loners/couples/friends at intervals, having a good time chatting or guzzling liquor in aerated water bottles. On reaching the top, you see a giant boulder. Take a left and you go to a village, go right and you reach a point to park your ass and relax at. You can park your bike/car/ass anywhere on the way to the top.

On the way back down, we were cursing ourselves for not carrying more than one bottle of water. An advantage of walking all the way down is it teaches a good lesson – can’t kick yourself for unparalleled stupidity when your legs are about to come off.

Here’s what to do: Go to Raintree Marg between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. in a vehicle, carry food and water because I’m not sure if you get any in the village. I would’ve gone ahead and found out but with the last few sips of water all we could think of was walking back down before we died of dehydration. Carry an icebox because you will feel like drinking when you reach the top. Carry a tent if you can because the sun is merciless and it might get too hot in the car.

If anyone’s planning on committing suicide by jumping off any part of Kharghar Hills, do invite me to watch. Please don’t crash your cars and bikes while sparking that joint and pouring that drink on the way up. And careful when you try any wild tantric positions lest you suddenly spot a snake or cheetah and fall into the valley.

There have been no reports of snakes or cheetahs in or around Kharghar Hills.

Like this:

Next to Infinity Mall (Link Road, Lokhandwala) and Time And Again is a fuckall restobar called “Fingers Cross”. People come here mainly to drink comparably inexpensive draught beer (Foster’s). Fingers Cross blares horrendous trendy music to give brainless people something to relate to.

The indifferent vibe Fingers Cross gives out also shows in the food it serves. T2 and Sneha have already called for Chinese starters and I sit back with some bottled beer. I ask for non-vegetarian nachos and they don’t have any (they point it out on the menu).

Some more beer and I ask for vegetarian nachos with jalapenos and some chicken pizza. They say vegetarian nachos don’t have jalapenos and I ask them to please add some and they come back and tell me they’re out of jalapenos.

The pizza is okay and doesn’t do much to make the experience of eating at Fingers Cross feel good. The nachos are here and you’d think the chef wiped the tortilla chips with his ass because they seem to have run out of cheese, too. I decorate it with chilly flakes, oregano and Tabasco for the pic. I’m a sucker for spicy food and can have Tabasco, oregano and chilly flakes for dinner so I go about business as anywhere else, sprinkling the stuff on the drops of cheese I come across.

I’ll be writing about some really good restobars in the suburbs; if you’re reading this from Fingers Cross, you can go straight to Red Box (Lokhandwala) which is three minutes away.

Every year brings to me unasked for misery without fail. While I do enjoy moping around like a sober Goth on a dry day for say, a weekend every six months, helplessness is the uninvited ushpizin that always overstays his welcome. He just won’t leave till I pack my bags and announce a week’s holiday in Goa or some lesser paradise.

So I’m giving off most of the signs of being bipolar. My maternal and paternal grandfathers were diabetic, so sugar problems are all set to embrace me as diabetes skips a generation and I happen to be the lucky first born.

Going through a list of bizarre mental disorders can be an enriching experience. Schizotypal Personality Disorder, I belong to you. Derealization, you belong to me. Frotteurism, let’s pretend we don’t know each other.

“Mehta, you’re a hypochondriac,” said someone to me two, three years ago when I didn’t know what it meant. “The problem has finally been diagnosed,” I thought, relieved that my confusion was about to come to an end.

Taking a cue from 2007, 2009 hits me with the annual shit segment in December. This is not what I meant by year end special. At the ripe old age of 28, life tries to convince me yet again that love can knock at the door as easily as it can fly out of the window. Ring my bell.

Some awesome things have happened in 2008, and it has been the best year of my life so far. Here’s a summary of the unbelievably cool stuff that’s been going on with me.

First of all, I had a massive break-up just before 2008 began. Even though I wept like a pussy I didn’t forego the annual trip I make to Goa every January in Anjuna. I licked a transparent drop off the back of my right palm, understood everything about myself and the universe through hallucinations and came back to whatever was left of my senses and Bombay, only to return to Goa in June. This time, it was to meet a cool hot chick with whom I danced to some trance music outside Curlie’s at Anjuna beach.

Oh, the first thing I should’ve boasted about is my death metal band Exhumation winning Unchained ’08… on February 29, that too. My share of the prize money made it slightly easier for me to fly to Bangalore to witness thrash metal legends Megadeth in action.

Also attended a couple of fashion shows and spent most of that time at the free-booze bar validating whisky cocktails. A cop took advantage of my being drunk and handed me someone else’s license after stopping me at a check-point.

Then I went to Rajasthan for a month with my best friend who is now my girlfriend also. We went to Pushkar and some beautiful remote villages located deep inside the state using a useless bike. In Pushkar, I was accosted by a pandit who started telling me about the place without my having asked for his bullshit information. Y P Pandit asked to see my hand and started chanting something. Now I find these religious sales tactics a tad silly and decided to have some fun at what should have been my expense and laughed aloud when he said I owed him 1100 bucks. What a sucker of a priest, trying to squeeze money out of me!

Over the next two days, the semi-clad pandit always managed to spot me in the crowded market and if it weren’t for his stupid grin I might have been polite to him. Still breathing just to hear that I am a Satanist, asshole? But my Bombay Hindi did the trick before that. A firm ‘Dimaag mat chaat‘ (don’t lick my mind) made him back off for good, the stupid grin still plastered across his greedy face, while I proceeded with my guitar to jam with a bald British flautist on the hotel lawn overlooking the Brahmasarovar.

On returning to Bombay, I landed the coolest job on the planet thanks to my shoelaces which were untied. I watch movies and listen to music albums and write my ruthless opinions about them. I get to praise Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and Ram Gopal Varma as much as I want and also make fun of ridiculous celebrity statements with a good amount of enthusiasm.

Oh yes, check out the irony. I’m the only Satanist on Earth who uploads Christmas carols and makes slideshows on movies to watch during this cheery festive season. Most of my friends are thoroughly amused so you too are allowed to laugh… just this once. Buzz off!

Coming soon…Not too much, though – and don’t show your teeth

MINDBLOWING DISCLAIMER

The biased views expressed in this awesome blog belong to none other than me. Who else would they belong to, jackass? My kickass opinions are NOT endorsed by my employers or organisation, mainly because no one agrees with me. Also, this blog may contain explicit language not suitable for retards.

It’s hard to be shocked by most extreme metal these days and even harder to take most bands seriously. The old themes of religion bashing, although perhaps more relevant, and in dire need of being heard, than any other point in history, have started sounding trite and insincere when expressed through the vessel of heavy music. New bands either get caught up in the technical aspect of music or are too preoccupied in replicating a particular sound from a bygone era. While they have succeeded marvellously on the first front, it is the latter that is often found wanting in spirit and vitality. Europe and the United States, inspite of having a lucid history and having played pivotal parts at various junctures in the development of extreme metal, have long been sterile in breeding truly disgusting, obnoxiously putrid black/death metal . It is therefore a surprise of the most horrific aspect that one of the progenitors of American blasphemy have risen out of the fetid depths of oblivion to give vent to almost a decade’s worth of pent up depravity. ‘Profanatitas de Domonatia‘ is Profanatica’s first full length after seventeen years of being and goes some way in alleviating the frustration of years of inactivity.

zyaada teekha khaane ka nateeja

Paul Ledney was somewhat of an underground legend back in the day. Originally a member of Incantation and Revenant, he split from those illustrious institutions to form Profanatica, and, later on, Havohej. Profanatica are the cultest of the cult, having released only EPs and splits at sporadic intervals in their existence. They of course gained infamy and ridicule through the gratuitous display of reproductive organs on their album covers. But you see, Paul Ledney was never kidding when he proclaimed Profanatica as “the most blasphemous band on the planet”. While the band’s lyrics and general aesthetic conformed to set patterns of anti-Christian black/death, Profanatica were first and foremost iconoclasts. It is impossible to escape the feeling of utter disregard for all manner of convention that pervades the band’s work. Everything from the band’s artwork to Ledney’s condescendingly throat-shredding growls convey absolute disdain for everything that anybody holds sacred. I get the feeling that they’d as soon be singing glorified hymns to paedophilia if it meant getting a rise out of the sensitive. It is hard to come by that kind of fervour in today’s extreme metal scene and while many bands put out cosmetic reproductions of a lost style, very few capture the essence of danger that made the earliest, primitive explosions of hate and rage so compelling.

Musically speaking, Profanatica play a hybrid of black and doom-laden death metal. They really are an exercise in startlingly effective simplicity. Songs contain, on average, about 3-4 basic riffs. Tremolo picked notes serve as the basic template over which Ledney hurls his rabid diatribes. Often there are times when one can hear a guitar and nothing else buzz by itself before the rest of the instruments come in. Doom riffs bearing the Incantation hallmark step in at regular junctions and flesh out the dynamics of the music.

Speaking of Incantation, they truly are a huge presence on all Profanatica and if you’re any kind of Incantation fan, you’ll know it when the patented bits come in. It would be unfair to make a call on who influenced who since there must have been a fair amount of osmosis when the two bands started out. Be that as it may, Ledney distinguishes his band from his former colleagues by bringing in a pronounced black metal nuance to the table, more evolved melodic credentials, which by the way are used only in the service of the sinister, and by employing vocals far better than Incantation have ever had, Craig Pillard and Daniel Corchado notwithstanding. He sounds deranged, foaming-at-the-mouth, and utterly bereft of all compassion, and human notions of decency and morality. It’s a silly and seemingly innocuous thing to scream “I’ll tear this fucking religion to the ground” (‘Betrayal of the Lamb’) but you’d be hard pressed to call his bluff on it and you’d be hard pressed to suppress the chill that climbs down your spine when the chants-in-reverse ring out as the song ends. This is the same guy that sang ‘Dethrone the Son of God’. People familiar with that piece of blasphemy will be most pleased to know that the passing of a couple of decades hasn’t tampered with the sheer feral quality in his voice.

With ‘Profanatitas de Domonatia‘, Profanatica have regurgitated one of the vilest and most unholy slabs of black/death this decade and have done no harm whatsoever to the aura of mystery that surrounds them. All fans of primitive, minimalistic, and blasphemous metal should seek this out. Let the black ejaculation begin.